There is a cat in heat howling outside her bedroom window. This is the third night. She wants this cat to stop screaming so badly she would toss all of her morals into the barrel of a gun and shoot them in the general direction of the cat.
She tries to reason with it. “Finn’s neutered. You’re wasting your time. Try Archie, on Hamersley.”
Finn is eating his wet food, pretending to ignore the sounds but secretly relishing the attention. At two in the morning he starts hollering back. “I’m trapped in here,” he cries. “I so want to make sweet love to you, but I’m stuck in this house, licking my butt. Tell me again what you love most about me.”
She calls triple zero, Australia’s 911.
“What’s your emergency?”
She talks quickly, aware she’s jamming the line. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know who else to call. Does Perth have some sort of animal control center?”
“Is everything ok, ma’am?”
“Yes, I’m fine. There’s this cat in heat. I love cats, but I’m so… tired…” Her voice trails off as she is suddenly aware she’s insane. She hangs up.
The cat keeps yowling.
“What if women cried like this when they were ovulating?” Dave wonders.
Let’s all stay on point.
A place called Cat Haven says they’ll be happy to take her, but she’ll need to trap her and bring her in. She stages a variety of attempts involving hot food, gardening gloves, and using her own cat as bait, all of them unsuccessful.
Her sleep hasn’t been disrupted like this since she had a baby. We are never having another baby, she announces while washing dishes.
She remembers she owns a string hammock, sitting in a drawer. It was a wedding gift. It’s thirteen years old. We could use that as a trap. Toss it over the cat. “That won’t work,” says Dave, looking up from his phone.
She wants to hear a better idea.
She pours herself a glass of wine and starts cleaning the stove.
Her daughter enters the room nervously. Are you going to kill that cat, her daughter whispers. Of course not, she says. We love cats.
The noise will stop abruptly on the fourth night. She will get six consecutive hours of sleep and wake up with the hook from Thrift Shop stuck in her head. She will hope that poor cat is ok, and feel ashamed of herself. But she doesn’t know that now. She only knows she’s thankful she lives in a country with very few guns, none of them anywhere near her.